In Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi presents a thorough examination of an outdated concept in critical social theory and philosophy. This work covers, both historically and critically, the whole range of philosophical views surrounding the concept of alienation. Tracing the development of the concept from its first formulations in the mid-18th century to the few reformulations which still appear today, Jaeggi’s analysis demonstrates how important and indispensable the theme of alienation is for contemporary social philosophy and theory. She argues that alienation is not simply the detachment of the individual in relation to her self or the world. Jaeggi explains that the absence of such a relation is structurally impossible. Human beings are always in constant interaction with their selves and the world, and alienation refers to a deficiency in such a relational structure. Jaeggi states that alienation is a ‘relation of relationlessness,’ i.e. a disturbed appropriation of the self and the world, such that the productive and active rapport that merges self and world is no longer effective in a fulfilling manner. Consequently, the alienated subject ceases to be at her own command as her active engagement with the world fails to appropriate it effectively.
The book is divided into three parts. The first concentrates on the historical foundations of the concept of alienation. Jaeggi begins with Rousseau’s implicit broaching of the theme, and elaborates on his depiction of the deformation of human beings by society. She follows the development of this theme through to two theoretical strands in Continental philosophy: the first is the Hegelian-Marxist analysis of the alienation of individuals from social structures, the second is the Kierkegaardian-Heideggerian critique of the alienating character of the public world itself. Despite the crucial ontological differences among these philosophies, Jaeggi uncovers the overlapping alienation critique. Accordingly, her historical analysis demonstrates how the concept of alienation operates as an interpretative schema that helped articulate, throughout the 20th century, a normative dimension of social critique which branched into Marxist and existentialist analyses, as well as into the development of Critical Theory. The author finds that it is precisely this interpretative-critical aspect of the concept of alienation that can be salvaged from the essentialist presuppositions and metaphysical commitments with which these various philosophical positions coloured the theme and ultimately rendered it obsolete in the age of postmodernity and political liberalism.
In the second part, Jaeggi offers a phenomenological examination of individual cases of alienation in everyday life. As she addresses in each case a different mode of deficiency in the subject’s relation to self and world, Jaeggi reformulates and expands the structure of alienation by discussing the foremost theories of free will, personal identity, agency and freedom, in analytic philosophy. She enters into discussion with thinkers such as Tugendhat, Raz, Dahrendorf, Frankfurt, Nagel, Taylor, among others. What emerges is a concept that, in bringing to light functionally deficient relations of appropriation, points to the never-ending, always interpretative, productive processes that lie at the heart of the intersection of self and world.
In the third part of the book, Jaeggi takes a more elaborate engagement with the opposing models of the self she reviewed in the second section. The discussion centres around the critique of two main conceptions of the self that conflict with her model of the self as a process of appropriation. The first is the concept of the essential self: an inner, authentic, unified, unchanging self. The second is the postmodern or poststructuralist idea of the self as self-inventing or a site of multiplicity. In opposition to the first model, Jaeggi emphasizes the fluid nature of the self in her account, one that conceives of the self not as static but as always active, relational and externalizing. Against the second model, Jaeggi reveals the experiential vacuity at the core of a self that continually has to create itself anew and out of nowhere. Although Jaeggi defends a limited form of unity of the self, she does not understand it as some immutable substance but rather as a formal integration of all experiences, a reference point to all the process of appropriation of an individual. Thus, Jaeggi defines her ‘appropriative model’ of the self in terms of the transformative nature of appropriation: there is no beginning or end of such a process since the self is always already involved in and changed with every activity. The author therefore argues for a self that is always in transformation, necessarily re-interpreting her given conditions with every act. This third part of the book ends with an outline of implications concerning the analysis of alienation, which focuses on the social nature of the appropriative model of the self, and its necessary involvement in shaping the social practices and institutions in and through which the individual appropriates herself and the world in a meaningful way. Jaeggi leaves this task for future social theorists, emphasizing that any experience of alienation that might threaten modern society cannot be addressed without critically assessing the extent to which social institutions can become structures for the emancipation of the individual.
The result of Jaeggi’s analysis is a definition of ‘alienation’ not as an exact technical term that isolates a specified ailment affecting an individual. Rather, what emerges from her investigation is a theme that encompasses a large range of conceptual structures that aim to capture the multifaceted relation the subject has with the world. Alienation as a concept for the deficient process of appropriation is thus able to test the conceptual efficacy of the various formal analyses of social structures in contemporary social philosophy. Furthermore, it is important to point out that the method of analysis that Jaeggi develops is not exclusive to the matter under study. Jaeggi's conceptual re-construction is indicative of the direction that social theory and in some level philosophy itself is taking, namely the move away from metaphysical commitments regarding the theory of the self on either end of the spectrum, i.e., essentialism or certain forms of postmodernism, in order to take a more pragmatic approach to social critique. Jaeggi gives us a sense of this direction social theory is taking in her keen engagement with the literature in her academic community. Consequently, not only does the translation of this book offer English-speaking scholarship a comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the concept of alienation, it also provides Anglo-American scholars with some insight into the current debates in German social philosophy.
